Amazon's WorkMail Is Late to the Party

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It’s not David and Goliath. It’s David, without a slingshot, battling a Goliath who has recently beaten David’s more popular brother Google Apps.

The launch of Amazon’s WorkMail makes perfect sense on paper. It should have an offering in the enterprise email server market – its rivals have been in it for years. The trouble for Amazon is that it’s incredibly late and it looks like it has no stand out features. To make matters worse for Amazon, Microsoft unquestionably leads the world in the provision of enterprise email inboxes – both in on-premises Exchange and now in the cloud with Office 365.

Of course, high-profile security breaches such as Sony and Target have heightened the interest of enterprises in the security of their email services. Encryption for email in transit is growing in importance and reflects the critical importance email plays in business, but this is not the be-all and end-all of securing email from snooping eyes, legitimate or otherwise.

Businesses need to be thinking about making their email safe beyond the actual inbox and transit encryption. This is where third-party cloud service providers for email security, archiving and continuity, like Mimecast, come in.

Businesses also have to consider carefully how best to deploy their business critical services in the cloud era – the answer certainly isn’t relying on one vendor for everything. Amazon, Google or Microsoft for that matter. On the other hand, you don’t want a myriad of vendors or you’ll be left paying for, and managing, all this additional technology in the cloud, very much like you are doing on-premise now.

The news about WorkMail doesn’t change this fundamental challenge.

Unseating Microsoft from its position as enterprise email server of choice, with more than 300 million Exchange inboxes out there, will take some revolutionary ideas. Competition is a good thing, of course. Even though we’ve been supporting email services from Google and Microsoft for years, we will look closely at how WorkMail does in the market.

That said, my first assessment of WorkMail from news reports suggests that its basic offering of encryption and calendars, however priced or packaged, won’t be the revolutionary spark Amazon needs to unseat the entrenched competition potentially even within AWS’ own customer base.

But didn’t they say that about David’s chances against Goliath? No, scratch that. This time the big dog does win.

Neil is one of the people who helped build Mimecast. Not just metaphorically, but literally. He’s led the development team from our inception – when he was the development team – overseeing the construction of our platform from the ground up. It’s thanks to him that Mimecast, uniquely, was conceived and built as a single, integrated platform rather than a set of bolted-together services.